7 posts and columns on fiction

Coliloquy’s Active Publishing Platform Lets Readers Create Designer Heroines (Demo)

in Dive Into Media on January 31 at 4:26 pm PT

When we were kids, cutting-edge publishing technology was pretty much limited to “choose your own adventure” books. Coliloquy, demoing at D: Dive Into Media, offers a little more interactivity.
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Video: Sean Parker on No Victoria's Secret Models in Silicon Valley (What?!?!)

in News on January 24, 2011 at 8:57 am PT

Here is former Napster troublemaker, former Facebook consigliere and current investor, entrepreneur and movie subject Sean Parker onstage at the DLD conference in Munich, Germany, yesterday. It was vintage Parker, who always tries to paint himself as more of a geek than the multicolored life of the digital party. In truth, he is very much both.

News Byte

NYT to Give E-Books Their Own Best-Seller Lists

in News on November 11, 2010 at 2:29 am PT

In another sign of the integration of digital books into the mainstream, the New York Times announced it would begin publishing e-book best-seller lists in fiction and nonfiction beginning early next year. The sales data will be collected weekly from a variety of sources, including publishers, chain bookstores, independent booksellers and online retailers.

Like E-Books? Amazon Sells More of Them, for Less, Than Apple. For Now.

in Media on June 19, 2010 at 4:00 am PT

The introduction of Apple’s iPad and iBooks store has lots of people forecasting doom for Amazon’s Kindle. And the iPad will obviously eat it into Kindle’s market share. But for now, at least, Amazon still has deeper relationships with book publishers. Will consumers care?

BoomTown's Top 10 List of Fact-Challenged Revelations That Should Be in the Facebook Tell-All Book

in News on June 24, 2009 at 3:34 pm PT

How much is BoomTown and everyone else in Silicon Valley trying to nab a copy of Ben Mezrich’s likely-to-be-entirely-made-up-but-who-cares tale of dirty doings at Facebook? Muchety-much! But, so far I have come up peanuts in grabbing an early copy of the work of “fact”-ion–titled “The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal”–which is set to come out July 14, along with a movie later. Facebook is not pleased, of course, and will likely be challenging Mezrich’s work as specious dreck, but here’s my own list of 10 completely made-up, utterly fabricated, just-call-me-Jayson-Blair facts that should be in the book.
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The Yahoo Rumor Mill–The Broken Clock Will Be Right at Some Time

in News on December 1, 2008 at 3:25 pm PT

Let me be crystal clear: Yahoo and Microsoft are not currently secretly at work on a pricey new search partnership and a piece this weekend in the Times of London that said they were is inaccurate. It’s natural for the idea to be brought up, since they have talked about such a deal many months ago and have indicated publicly and recently that they should again in the future, so smart betting is correct in guessing that they probably will do some sort of search deal in the months ahead. Still, various rumors pop up weekly about deals between the pair, which are about as convoluted as a mash-up of “Richard III” and “Macbeth,” with some “Three’s Company” thrown in for comic relief.